Views on the Paris Climate Agreement

The June 2017 AP-NORC Poll of 1,068 adults explores the public's attitudes about the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gases.

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Few Americans support the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gases and half believe withdrawal will harm the country’s economy in the long run, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Twenty-nine percent of Americans say they strongly or somewhat support withdrawing from the agreement, 23 percent neither support nor oppose, and 46 percent somewhat or strongly oppose withdrawing. Fifty-one percent of Republicans support the withdrawal while 69 percent of Democrats oppose it, and those who say climate change is not happening are three times as likely as those who say it is to support withdrawing from the agreement.

Forty-four percent of Americans are concerned that withdrawing from the Paris agreement will hurt the country’s reputation, and another 43 percent are concerned that global efforts to fight climate change will be harmed by U.S. withdrawal. Half believe that withdrawing from the agreement will be harmful to the economy in the long run.

The nationwide poll was conducted June 8-11, 2017 using the AmeriSpeak® Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 1,068 adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.